Grattan, in the curious portrait which he has traced of the first Pitt, wrote: "The Minister was alone. Modern degeneracy had not touched him. An old-fashioned inflexibility governed this character which knew neither how to alter nor to become supple.... Creator, destroyer, reformer, he had received from Heaven all that was required to convoke men into a social group, to break their bonds or to reform them...." Lady Hester had inherited these astonishing gifts, which her unconventional education had still further strengthened. Under the eyes of her frightened governesses who had abandoned the impossible task of making her a young girl like the others, without the knowledge of her father and her stepmother, who, besides, were not interested in the matter, she sprouted forth luxuriantly. In the same way as her figure and her "little" foot, never constrained, developed magnificently, her luminous intelligence, her originality, her energy, her rough clear-sightedness forcibly asserted themselves. Never contradicted, she might be proud of her qualities and of her extraordinary faults, proud also of that indomitable character which she had alone formed and which never inclined before anyone, ignorant at once of the art of changing principles or that of humouring public opinion by half-loyal measures or proceedings. Amongst all those wonderful women in which the eighteenth century, according to Burke, was so fertile, Lady Hester Stanhope has a place apart. The Duchess of Rutland, the Duchess of Gordon, the Duchess of Devonshire, Mrs. Bouverie, the Marchioness of Salisbury, Mrs. Crewe, Lady Bessborough, Lady Liverpool and many others, who had on their side fortune, beauty, charm, fascination and grace, cannot be compared to her. Morally and physically, Lady Hester is outside the picture. She is the echo, not only of the feminine character of her time, but of the characteristic tendencies of her age. Preoccupation with the Eastern problem, misanthropy, taste for action, hatred of hypocrisy, love of social questions and contempt for the people, were imperfectly embodied, but they were embodied all the same. Her misfortune was to be a woman. So long as her uncle Pitt had been near her, she had been able to imagine that she had changed her sex. She had lived, acted and thought as a man, but as a man who would have been a beautiful woman and whom the admiration of the crowd retains far from the combats of politics and the struggle of life.